Lat. sĕdēre

The verb meaning ‘to sit’ in Latin was sĕdēre, whose main meaning
was the stative ‘to sit, be sitting’ (Sp. ‘estar sentado’), though seemingly
not the active (change of state) meaning ‘to sit down’ (Sp. ‘sentarse’). This
verb’s principal parts were the following:

present indicative

sĕdeō

sĕd‑e‑ō

‘I sit’, ‘I am sitting (down)’, ‘I am
seated’

present infinitive

sĕdēre

sĕd‑ē‑re

‘to sit’, ‘to be
sitting (down)’, ‘to be seated’

perfect active

sēdī

sēd‑ī

‘I sat’, ‘I was sitting’, ‘I was
seated’

passive participle

sĕssus

sĕd‑t‑us

‘seated, having
been seated’

The two crucial stems here are sĕd‑, as seen in the infinitive, for instance, and sĕss‑, from which other
words are derived, including several Spanish-English cognates, such as Eng. session ~ Sp. sesión, as we shall see. In the root sed‑, we recognize the unchanged Proto-Indo-European basic root *sed‑. The derived supine/passive
participle stem sess‑ is an irregular
one, the result of adding the suffix passive suffix ‑t‑ to the basic root sed‑,
a root ending in ‑d, without an
intervening vowel. In other words, an original (unattested) *sed-t- changed to sess‑ (cf. Part I, Chapter 8, §8.4.3.5.3.2).

Lat. sīdĕre

In
addition to this verb sĕdēre,
Latin had an verb that referred to the action of sitting down, namely the third
conjugation verb sīdĕre ‘to sit
down’, which referred to the action of sitting down. These two verbs are
obviously related. We have already mentioned the basic form *sed‑ of the Proto-Indo-European root, as
well as the o-grade form *sod‑, from where Eng. set ultimately comes. In addition, there
were three more variants of this root. One is the zero-grade variant, namely *sd‑ (it could also be *zd), which was found in reduplicated
form and in compounds. A compound example was PIE *ni‑zd‑o‑ ‘nest’, formed with the root *ni‑ ‘down’. From this word come both Eng. nest and Sp. nido. The
former comes from Proto-Germanic *nistaz
and the latter comes from Lat. nīdus
(from an earlier *nizdus).[1]

The reduplicated zero-grade form of this
Proto-Indo-European root has been reconstructed *si‑sd‑ or *si‑zd‑. It is
from this reduplicated form that the 3rd conjugation Latin verb sīdĕre is thought to have come. Its
meaning was an active one, namely ‘to sit down, to seat oneself, to settle’,
cf. Eng. sitdown, Sp. sentarse. This
verb’s principal parts were the following:

present indicative

sīdō

sīd‑ō

‘I sit down’

present infinitive

sīdĕre

sīd‑ĕ‑re

‘to sit down’

perfect active

sīdī

sīd‑ī

‘I sat (myself) down’

As we can see, this verb has no supine or passive
participle form and thus no passive verb forms. Its direct source has been
reconstructed as Proto-Italic *sizdō
(present indicative), and its ultimate source has been reconstructed as
Proto-Indo-European *sísdeti, a
thematic i-reduplicated verbal root
variant of the basic root *sed‑. The
verb sīdĕre, as well as other verbs
derived from this one by prefixation, such as cōnsīdĕre, are the way to express the action verb of sitting
down in Latin.

Verbs of sitting in Spanish and other Romance languages

Forms of the Latin verb sĕdēre
suffered several sound changes in Vulgar Latin and early Romance, such as the
loss of the intervocalic ‑d‑,
resulting in the infinitive verb form seer,
for example. In part because of this, some of this verb’s forms became confused
in some Romance languages with forms of the third conjugation Vulgar Latin verb
ĕssĕre ‘to be’, which had come to
replace the even more irregular Classical Latin esse (principal parts: sum,
esse, fuī, futūrus). Proof of
this confusion is the fact that some of the verbal forms of the Spanish verb ser ‘to be’ come not from equivalent
forms of Lat. esse, but rather of the
verb sĕdēre,
including probably the infinitive form ser
by loss of the intervocalic ‑d‑ (sĕdēre > seere > ser) and definitely the present subjunctive forms sea, seas,
etc., which obviously comes from Lat. sedeam,
sedeās, etc., present
subjunctive of sedēre, not of esse. The confusion between the two
verbs was probably aided, no doubt, because the verb sĕdēre ‘to be (sitting)’ had come to be used as a
synonym of essere ‘to be’ in some
contexts.

Probably because of this confusion sound and meaning
confusion, alternatives to Lat. sĕdēre
appared in some Romance languages. One option was to use a prefixed form of
this verb, namely a verb that has been reconstructed as *assedēre, derived from sĕdēre
by the addition of the prefix ad‑ ‘to,
towards’ (ad+sĕdēre).
Actually, this Vulgar Latin or early Romance verb was probably derived from the
second-conjugation Latin verb assĭdēre,
whose principal parts were assĭdĕō, assĭdēre, assēdī, assĕssum. This verb
meant primarily ‘to sit by or near a person or thing’ and was derived from sĕdēre plus the prefix ad‑, with full assimilation of the final
d of the prefix to the following s in the root (‑d‑+‑s‑ → ‑ss‑).

Note that the root morpheme of the first two principal parts
of this derived verb was ‑sĭd‑, not ‑sĕd‑. The former was an
allomorph of the latter and it should not be confused with the root sīd‑, with a long ī,
of the third conjugation verb sīdĕre
we just saw. Vowel mutation in Latin roots was common when prefixes were added (cf.
Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.3.3).
Much later, the short ĭ was changed to e in the Romance languages, resulting in
*assedere, a reconstructed,
unattested form. (We will return to this prefixed verb derived from sĕdēre, along with many
others, in the following section.)

One Romance language in which the verb meaning ‘to sit’ comes from Latin assĭdēre or *assedere is
French. The verb ‘to sit’ in Modern French is asseoir [aswaʀ], which from Vulgar Latin *assedere, with the prefix ad‑,
but not the present participle ending ‑ent‑.
Actually, asseoir is a transitive verb,
just like Sp. sentar is, and it is
typically used conjugated reflexively, as s’asseoir
‘to sit down’, the equivalent of Sp. sentarse.

Not all Romance languages resorted to this derived verb for
their verb meaning (stative) ‘to sit, be sitting/seated’ or (active) ‘to sit
down’. In Catalan, the verb meaning ‘to sit down’ (action) and ‘be sitting’
(state) is (non-reflexive) seure (Sp.
sentarse and estar sentado/a), which comes directly from Latin sĕdēre. In Italian, the cognate
of this verb is sedere, from the same
Latin source. This verb is also used for both the state ‘to sit, be sitting, be
seated’ and for the action ‘to sit down’, although for the action, the reflexive
form sedersi ‘to sit down’ is also
used (cf. Sp. sentarse).

In Spanish and Portuguese, the two main Iberian
Romance languages, the solution to the ambiguity of Lat. sĕdēre was to derive a new verb from Lat. sĕdēre. The derived Vulgar
Latin or Romance verb for the meaning ‘to sit’ that these languages now have has
been reconstructed as *sĕdĕntāre.
This first conjugation verb was formed from the stem sĕdĕnt‑ (sĕd-ĕnt‑) of the
present participle sĕdēns ‘seating,
being seated’ of the verb sĕdēre
(sĕd‑ēre). It is from this
Vulgar Latin verb that comes the Spanish verb sentar (sent‑ar) by loss
of intervocalic ‑d‑ and coalescence
of the two short ĕ vowels, as well as
the loss of the final ‑e vowel: Vulg.
Lat. sĕdĕntāre > Sp. sentar. The verb sentar is a stem-changing verb in which the root’s e vowel changes to ie when stressed, a result of the Old Spanish sound change that
affected the Latin short ĕ vowel (cf. Part I,
Chapter 10,
§10.3.2).

Lat. infinitive

Lat. present
participle

V.Lat. derived
verb

Spanish

sĕdēre (sĕd‑ē‑re)

sĕdēns, sĕdĕnt‑ (sĕd-ĕnt‑)

sedentare

sentar

assĭdēre (ad‑sĕd‑ē‑re)

assĭdēns, assĭdĕnt‑
(ad‑sĕd‑ĕnt‑)

assedentare

asentar

In Modern Spanish, the verb sentar is first of all a transitive verb meaning ‘to seat’, equivalent
to hacer sentarse, though that use is
quite rare. In other words, sentar
cannot be used for the action of sitting down the way Cat. seure and It. sedere can,
though this was possible in Old Spanish. This transitive verb sentar can also have, less commonly, the
meaning ‘to set, establish’, especially in several idiomatic expressions such
as sentar las bases ‘to lay the
foundations’, sentar cabeza ‘to
settle down’, or sentar un precedente
‘to set a precedent’.

There is an intransitive use of sentar that is very common, however, always accompanied by an
adverb such as bien ‘well’ or mal ‘badly’. The subject of this
intransitive sentar are things that
do good to or upset someone, such as foods, drinks, the climate, etc. Sentences
with this sense of sentar always have
an indirect object, thus making this a verb of the gustar type. The following are some sample sentences:

Much more common than this transitive verb sentar ‘to seat’ is the intransitive
reflexive variant sentarse ‘to sit
down’. Both sentar and sentarse are verbs that denote actions,
cf. English transitive seat and
intransitive sit down, respectively.
The stative sense of the English verb to
sit (equivalent to be seated or be sitting) is expressed not with a verb
in Spanish, but with the adjective sentado/a
derived (converted) from the identical past participle of this verb, as in estar sentado ‘to be seated/sitting
(down)’ (sent‑a‑d‑o). The ‘be
located’ sense of Eng. sit translates
as estar(situado/a), hallarse,
among others, e.g. The house sits on top
of a hill ‘la casa está (situada) en lo alto de una colina’. There are also
idiomatic expressions with Eng. sit
that do not translate into Spanish with the verb sentar(se), such as sit still
‘quedarse quieto’, sit tight
‘quedarse en un sitio’, or sit on a jury
‘ser miembro de un jurado’.

We should also note that the verb sentarse ‘to sit down’, which primarily refers to the action of sitting
down, can also sometimes be used with a stative (non-active) sense of being sat
down (i.e. sitting or being seated). Thus, for instance, the main meaning of the sentence
Íñigo se sentó en esa silla is ‘Íñigo
sat down on that chair’, but the sentence can also refer to the period of time
that this person was sitting there, which would translate as ‘Íñigo sat (was sitting/seated)
on that chair’. The same thing is true in the habitual present tense, so that Íñigo normalmente se sienta en esa silla
means primarily ‘Íñigo usually sits down on that chair’, but it can also have the
stative meaning ‘Íñigo usually sits (is seated) on that chair’. The ambiguity of
the active and stative senses of Sp. sentarse
are also found in Eng. sit, as we saw
earlier and, no doubt, in Lat. sĕdēre,
a fact that accounts of these words typically do not clearly specify.

The Spanish verb sentar
has cognates in Galician and Portuguese and, curiously also in Friulian and
Venetian, but not in other Romance languages. It is also interesting that
patrimonial Sp. sentar is not
attested until rather late, in the 15th century. That is because in Old
Spanish, the patrimonial version of this verb, as attested in the Cid, for
example, was assentar, not sentar. In other words, the patrimonial
Spanish verb was derived not from a Vulgar Latin *sĕdĕntāre but from *assĕdĕntāre.
In other words, the verb assentar was
derived not from the present participle of sĕdēre
but from the present participle of assĕdēre
(see above) (ad‑sĕd‑ĕnt‑ā‑re). The
prefixation, in addition to the suffixation, of this root would seem to have
been ways to make up for the confusion between the Latin verbs sĕdēre and *essĕre (Classical Lat. esse). Although assentar is found in reflexive form early on, between the 12th and
14th centuries, as in assentarsea la mesa ‘to sit at the table’, this
verb could also be used non-reflexively with the intransitive active meaning
that require reflexive forms today.

It would seem that Old Spanish assentar(se) lost the initial a‑
vowel. (The ‑ss‑ was the way the
sound [s] was spelled in Old Spanish between vowels, since one ‑s‑ alone between vowels was pronounced
[z].) However, the verb asentar(se)
was not totally replaced by the verb sentar(se).
The verb asentar(se) still exists in
Spanish. As a transitive verb it is rare, and it means ‘to set firmly, to fix,
set, etc.’, as in the phrase asentar las
bases ‘to lay the foundations’. But, as in the case of the verb sentar, Spanish asentar is mostly used intransitively as a reflexive, namely as asentarse, which means ‘to settle’ or, when talking of birds, ‘to
perch’. The noun derived from this verb is asentamiento,
which means ‘settlement’ (a‑sent‑a‑mient‑o).

Lat. sēdāre

In addition to sĕdēre
and sīdĕre, Latin also had a verb sēdāre, which meant ‘to
bring to rest, lay’, ‘to settle, calm (down)’, etc. It a causative form of sĕdēre and it comes from
the same Proto-Indo-European root or, actually, from a lengthened e-grade
version of that root (see above). The verb sēdāre
is the source of the cognates Eng. sedate
~ Sp. sedar, both of which fairly
recent learned words, especially Sp. sedar,
which didn’t appear in the DRAE until 1817. Their meaning is the same, namely
‘to administer a sedative to; calm or relieve by means of a sedative drug’
(AHD). As usual, the base form of this Latinate Spanish verb, sedar, is derived from the Latin
infinitive form, sēdāre,
and the base form of this Latinate English verb, sedate, is derived from the passive participle form, sēdātus.

The English verb sedate
[sə.ˈdeɪ̯t] is first attested in the 17th century with the sense ‘to make calm’,
not the current one. Actually, the original Eng. sedate eventually became archaic, if not obsolete, and the modern
verb to sedate is thought to be a
back-formation of the noun sedative [ˈsɛ.də.tɪv],
a noun derived by ellipsis from the phrase sedative
drug (for back formation and ellipsis, see Part I, Chapter 5,
§5.9,
§5.10.5).
In other words, the noun sedative was
derived from the identical adjective sedative
meaning ‘promoting calm or inducing sleep’ (COED). This adjective is first
attested in English in the early 15th century and it is a borrowing from
Medieval Latin sedativus (sed‑at‑iv‑us), formed with the adjective
forming Latin suffix ‑īv‑ added to the passive
participle stem sēdāt‑
of the verb sēdāre. The
English adjective sedative quite
likely came into the language through French, where learned sédatif is attested already in the early
14th century. Spanish no doubt got both the adjective sedativo/a and the verb sedar
through French and perhaps English as well.

The Latin verb sēdāre
was a regular first conjugation verb whose principal parts were the following:

present indicative

sēdō

sēd-ō

‘I allay, settle, still, calm, assuage,
appease’

present infinitive

sēdāre

sēd-ā-re

‘to I allay,
settle, still, calm, assuage, appease’

perfect active

sēdāvī

sēd-ā-vī

‘I allayed, settled, stilled,
calmed, assuaged, appeased’

passive participle

sēdātus

sēd-ā-t-us

‘allayed, calmed,
appeased’

In addition to the verb sedate,
English also borrowed the Latin adjective sedate
in the 17th century, with the same pronunciation, which means ‘serenely
deliberate, composed, and dignified in character or manner’ (AHD). The
adjective sedate translates into
Spanish as sosegado/a, sereno/a, tranquilo/a. Of course, there are also past participles of these
verbs, namely Eng. sedated ~ Sp. sedado/a, which can be used as
adjectives as well, with the same meaning, ‘treated with sedatives’.

Both the adjective and the noun sedative translate into Spanish primarily as (masc.) sedante (calmante is another option for the noun), though sedativo is also a less common option
for both.

Besides Medieval Latin sedativus,
there were two other nouns in Classical Latin that were derived from the
passive participle stem sēdāt‑ (sēd‑ā‑t‑), namely sēdātĭō and sēdātor. Lat.
sēdātĭō was formed with the suffix ‑ĭōn‑ that created nouns of action or
effect, and it meant ‘an allaying, assuaging, calming’. Lat. sēdātor was formed with the agent suffix
‑ōr‑ and it meant ‘an allayer,
calmer, quieter’. The latter noun has not been borrowed into English or Spanish
but the former has as Eng. sedation
and Sp. sedación. The Spanish word is
very rare but the English one is often found in the expression under sedation, which translates into
Spanish with the adjective sedado/a (see
above). Eng. sedation refers to ‘the
administering of a sedative drug to produce a state of calm or sleep’ and,
derived from it, ‘a state of calm or sleep produced by a sedative’ (COED).

Conclusion

Now we can see together the three Latin verbs derived
from the same Proto-Indo-European root *sed‑
or one of its variants. In order of commonality, these are the three verbs,
from the second, third, and first conjugation, respectively.

sĕdēre

‘to sit,
be sitting’, ‘to remain’, ‘to settle’,
‘to encamp’

sīdĕre

‘to sit down, to seat oneself’, ‘to
settle’

sēdāre

‘to bring to rest, lay’, ‘to settle, calm (down)’, etc.

In the next section we will look at Latin words
derived from these verbs and the English and Spanish cognates that they have
resulted in. The derivates come for the most part from Lat. sĕdēre, the most common of
all three verbs.

[1] It has been suggested that the cognates Eng. niche (pronounced [nɪʧ] or [niʃ]) ~ Sp. nicho also come ultimately from Lat. nīdus. According to a theory, these
words come Vulgar Latin *nīdicāre or
*nid(i)c(u)lare ‘to nest’, from Latin
nīdus ‘nest’, though this theory has
its problems.

Although they do not look much alike, the Spanish verb sentar and the English verb sit are indeed cognate, if not exactly
cognates, since they both can be traced back to the reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European root *sed- ‘to sit,
be seated’. In this chapter we will tell the story of words that have come into
English and Spanish from this root, which as we will see had three variants in the
original Proto-Indo-European language, and the many cognates in these languages
that are derived from it. Cognates typically came through Latin, not as in the
case of sentar and sit, which are patrimonial words in
their respective languages.

The intransitive English verb sit [ˈsɪt] is a common Germanic one, with cognates in all other
Germanic languages, such as Dutch zitten,
German sitzen, and Swedish sitta. In Middle English, it was sitten and in Old English sittan. The Proto-Germanic word that these
Garmanic verbs come from has been constructed as *sitjaną. It has cognates in other Indo-European languages, such as
Irish suigh, Sanskrit सीदति (sīdati), and Russian
сиде́ть (sidétʹ).

In Modern English, the verb sit is typically a stative one, equivalent to to be sitting (down). For the action of sitting, the phrasal verb sit down is typically used, although in
some situations the adverbial down is
not needed. For instance, in the command forms Sit!, which does indeed refer to the act of sitting down, the
adverbial down can sometimes be
omitted, such as when giving commands to dogs. (For more on English phrasal verbs,
see Part I, Chapter 4,
§4.12.3.)

The verb sit
is what’s called a strong verb whose past tense and past participle are both sat [ˈsæt].
(In Old English, the past tense of this verb is attested as set and sette, among others, and the past participle as geseten and seten, among others.)

English also has a transitive verb to seat, whose main
meaning today is ‘to place on a seat or seats; to cause to sit down’ (OED).
This verb developed in the 16th century out of the noun seat, whose primary meaning is ‘a thing made or used for sitting
on, such as a chair or stool’ (COED), though it has a few other secondary
senses (see below). The noun seat is
a loanword from around the year 1200 from Old Norse sæti ‘seat, position’, from Proto-Germanic *sētiją. The verb seat that
was derived from the noun seat at
first meant ‘to be in a certain position’, but already in the early 1600’s it had
acquired its modern transitive and causative meaning ‘to cause to be seated’. The
past participle of the verb seat is seated, which has been converted into an
adjective too, which is how this word is mostly used. It is equivalent to Sp. sentado/a, the past participle of Sp. sentar (see below), as in She was seated to his right (Sp. Estaba sentada a su izquierda).

The noun seat
translates in different ways into Spanish since seat is a polysemous word, with
senses such as ‘place to sit’ (Sp. asiento),
‘part of a chair’ (Sp. asiento as
well), ‘part of trousers’ (Sp. parte del
trasero, etc.), etc. The most common equivalent of the noun seat in Spanish is asiento, which translates its main meaning, a word that will be
explored below. Other words may be used to translate the noun seat, however. A numbered seat in a
stadium may be called localidad and
in a theater butaca. In a legislature,
a seat is known as escaño, and in a
committee, it is a puesto or lugar, and on a bus or airplane it may
translate as plaza. Also, a bicycle
seat is a sillín in Spanish. When a
seat refers to a headquarters, central office or venue, Spanish may use the
word sede, which we will return to
later as well, since it is derived from the same root (more on Sp. sede below).

Additionally, this word is found in many idiomatic
expressions, such as to take a seat (Sp.
tomar asiento), to take a back seat (Sp. tomar
un papel secundario, mantenerse al
margen) and in the driver’s seat (Sp.
al control, llevar las riendas), and collocations, such as window seat (Sp. asiento de
la ventana) and reserve a seat
(Sp. reservar una plaza, etc.).

The noun seat that
was borrowed from Old Norse was a cognate of Old English noun set, derived from the also patrimonial
verb to set, and meaning ‘the act of
setting’, as in sunset, but it could
also mean ‘seat’, ‘a place where people remain’, etc. The verb set comes from Old English settan which meant ‘to cause to sit, put
in some place’ among other things, much like Modern English set does. The verbs seat and set derive from
transitive (causative) Proto-Germanic *(bi)satjan
‘to cause to sit, set’, which comes from a Proto-Indo-European root *sod‑, which was a variant of the root *sed‑ that we have already seen.[2]

Proto-Indo-European roots had variants in which the
vowel could change to modify the meaning of the root. (For more on
Proto-Indo-European, see Part I, Chapter 3;
for more on what a root is, see Part I, Chapter 5.)
This system is known as ablaut (cf. Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.3.3).
The English wordforms singsangsungsong are a remnant of a type of
ablaut in English, a Germanic language. Proto-Indo-European roots could have
different ablaut grades, depending on what the root’s vowel was, such as the
following:

zero

short

long

∅

e

ē

o

ō

Investigators have been able to reconstruct some
aspects of the Proto-Indo-European ablaut system. According to these
reconstructions, we know that this PIE root had four different forms, each one
of them has been found to have had different optional suffixes attached to
them: (1) basic form sed‑; (2) an
o-grade variant sod‑; (3) a
zero-grade variant sd‑; and (4) a
lengthened-grade form *sēd.
From these different variants come a number of words in English and Spanish,
from Eng. sit, nest, and soot, to Sp. sentar, asiento, and silla. In
this chapter we will look at all of these words.

Finally, before moving on to look ‘verbs of sitting’ in English
and Spanish, we should mention one other native word that contains this root and
which has a similar meaning, namely the verb settle. This verb, which was setlen
in Middle English, comes from Old English setlan
meaning ‘to settle, seat, put to rest’, which is only attested once and which was
derived from the Old English noun setl
‘seat, place of rest’, and thus we can see it was once a verb of sitting.[1]
The noun setl is derived from the Proto-Indo-European
stem *sedla‑, which contains the root
*sed‑ ‘to sit’, from which also come Latin
sella ‘seat, chair’, source of Sp. silla ‘chair’ (see below), and Old
English sadol ‘saddle’, source of Mod.
Eng. saddle.

The Old English verb setlan
meant ‘to seat; to put in a seat or place of rest; also, to cause to sit down’ (OED),
a meaning that is now obsolete. The OED gives 35 senses for this word, some containing
subsenses, most of which are not obsolete.[2]
However, the main meanings of these verb today are transitive ‘to put into
order; arrange or fix definitely as desired’ and intransitive ‘to discontinue
moving and come to rest in one place’ (AHD).

[1]Note that it seems that ‘in some uses, the verb [settle] became synonymous with the like-sounding Middle English saȝtle ‘to appease, reconcile’ (saughtel v.), association with which may
perhaps have influenced the development of these uses’ (OED).

[2]Regarfding those 35 senses, the OED tells us that “In many of the senses
explained below, the verb frequently appears with a colouring derived from
senses of different origin, so that the position of many of the examples is
open to dispute”.

[1] In some dialects of English, sit up can also have the meaning
‘refrain from going to bed until later than usual’ (COED). This would translate
into Spanish as quedarse levantado
or, if one sits up waiting for someone, esperar
levantado. English also has a noun derived from the phrasal verb sit up, namely situp or sit-up, that
means ‘a physical exercise designed to strengthen the abdominal muscles, in
which a person sits up from a supine position without using the arms for
leverage’ (COED). The noun dates from the mid-1950s in English. The Spanish
equivalent is (ejercicio) abdominal
(thus, to do situps translates as hacer abdominales in Spanish).

[2] The noun set
meaning ‘collection of things’, equivalent to Sp. conjunto, is according to some an unrelated homonym. It is a
mid-15th century loan from Old French sette
‘sequence’, a variant of secte
‘religious community’," from Medieval Latin secta ‘retinue’, from Latin secta
‘a faction’ or ‘a following’. According to others, English just borrowed this
new sense, a semantic calque, for the existing English word set.